Cookies on TV and in the Movies: Seinfeld, Shrek, The Santa Clause and More

Everyone loves to eat cookies, but we also can’t seem to get enough of them on TV and in the movies. Here’s a round-up of a few notable cookie references on the big and small screens.

Cookies on TV

Cookies have played bit parts in almost every TV series you can think of. One of the best-loved occurred on Seinfeld (“The Dinner Party”), when Jerry uses black and white cookies as an analogy for race. “Look to the cookie,” he says and advises that you want to get white and black in each mouthful.

On the Friends episode “The One with Phoebe’s Cookies,” Phoebe is devastated when her grandmother’s cookie recipe is lost in a fire. When she tries to recreate it, she learns what is probably true for many Americans: the “heirloom” recipe was just the Toll House Cookie recipe!

The Cookie Monster is probably the most famous TV cookie reference, and he actually appeared on the first episode of Sesame Street in 1969 and has been a regular ever since. He’s known for shouting “Me want cookie!” in his adorable gruff voice, but in a controversial move in 2006, he proclaimed that cookies are a “sometimes food,” in an effort to promote healthy diets.

Cookies in Commercials

In addition to appearances on TV shows, cookie commercials have become a big part of our culture. One of the best known is the commercials for Keebler cookies, baked by cartoon elves in a tree, making cookies that are “uncommonly made; uncommonly good.”

Oreo commercials have a way of sticking in our heads with jingles and slogans like “Oh! O-R-E-O” and “Oreo. America’s favorite cookie.”

Chips Ahoy has had memorable commercials, such as “1000 chips delicious” (prompting me as a child to actually count the chips in one bag). You might also remember the Nestle Toll House Cookie Break commercials, showing warm Toll House Cookies being broken in half to the tune of “Nestle bakes the very best.”

Cookies in the Movies

Cookies have played delicious roles in many a movie. In Michael, John Travolta plays an angel who smells like cookies (most definitely what angels should smell like!).

In The Santa Clause, Tim Allen is transitioning into Santa and orders warm cookies at a business lunch. Freaky Friday has a pivotal role for the cookie, when a fortune cookie causes a mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) and daughter (Lindsay Lohan) to switch bodies.

Who could forget Gingy in Shrek, a gingerbread cookie with an attitude, shouting “Bite me” or “Not the gumdrop buttons” when someone tried to take them off him.

One of my favorite cookie film moments is in Stranger than Fiction, when Will Ferrell takes a bite of a cookie and the narrator says, “As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be ok. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies.”

Brette Sember has watched “General Hospital” since she was 12 years old. At this point, her world view is too warped to ever recover. She’s also the author of more than 40 books, including Cookie: A Love Story: Fun Facts, Delicious Stories, Fascinating History, Tasty Recipes, and More. Brette’s web site is BretteSember.com. and she blogs at Putting It All on the Table.

Another cookie ad jingle that I was brainwashed by in childhood was for Nabisco Vanilla Wafers: “Eggs, eggs, eggs, good eggs like this and this go, with the very best butter and the very best flour, they go into Nabisco, Vanilla Wafers!”